He came—­a man bewildered—­bent down over her and found her lips; but almost absently, out of a daze.

“No, not like that,” she murmured.  “In the old way.”

There was a long embrace.

“I wouldn’t do it,” she said, “I don’t believe I’d have the courage to do it, if it were just me.  But there’s some one else—­I’ve made some one a promise.  I can’t tell you about that.  Now please go back and sit over there where you were, where we can talk quietly.—­Oh, Roddy, I love you so!—­No, please go back, old man!  And—­and light your pipe.  Oh, don’t tremble like that!  It—­it isn’t a tragedy.  It’s—­for us, it’s the greatest hope in the world.”

He went back to his chair.  He even lighted his pipe as she asked him to, and waited as steadily as he could for her to begin.

But she couldn’t begin while she looked at him.  She moved a little closer to the table and leaned her elbow on it, shaded her eyes with one hand, while the other played with the stump of a pencil that happened to be lying there.

“Do you remember ...” she began, and it was wonderful how quiet and steady her voice was.  There was even the trace of a smile about her wonderful mouth.  “Do you remember that afternoon of ours, the very first of them, when you brought home my note-books and found me asleep on the couch in our old back parlor?  Do you remember how you told me that one’s desires were the only motive power he had?  One couldn’t ride anywhere, you said, except on the backs of his own passions?  Well, it was a funny thing—­I got to wondering afterward what my desires were, and it seemed I hadn’t any.  Everything had, somehow, come to me before I knew I wanted it.  Everything in the world, even your love for me, came like that.

“But I’ve got a passion now, Rodney.  I’ve had it for a long while.  It’s a desire I can’t satisfy.  The thing I want, and there’s nothing in the world that I wouldn’t give to get it, is—­well, your friendship; that’s a way of saying it.”

What he had been waiting to hear, of course, she didn’t know.  But she knew by the way he started and stared at her, that it hadn’t been for that.  The thing struck him, it seemed, as a sort of grotesquely irritating anti-climax.

“Gracious Heaven!” he said.  “My friendship!  Why, I’m in love with you!  That’s certainly a bigger thing.  Go back to your geometry, child.  The greater includes the less, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know whether it’s a bigger thing or not,” she said.  “But it doesn’t include the other.  Love’s just a sort of miracle thing that happens to you.  You don’t have it because you deserve it.  The person I made that promise to would have earned it, if any one could.  But it doesn’t come that way.  It’s like lightning.  It strikes or else it doesn’t.  Well, it struck us.  But friendship—­there’s this about it.  You can’t get it any way in the world, except just by earning it.  Nobody can give it to you, no matter how hard he tries.  So when you’ve got it, you can always say, ’There’s something that I’m entitled to—­something that’s mine.’  Your love isn’t mine any more than the air is.  I never did anything to earn it.